Aircraft with one or more of large engine fan diameters, long fuselages, long wings, and specialized under-aircraft payloads, for example, may require a tall landing gear structure to provide ground clearance to the engine and sufficient clearance to the tail during take-off. While the aircraft is in flight, the landing gear structures generally are stored within corresponding wheel wells in the fuselage of the aircraft. Integrating larger landing gear structures into the aircraft may impose expensive design constraints on the aircraft and also may add weight, which in turn requires greater fuel consumption by the aircraft.
Landing gear structures on aircraft generally employ an oleo strut shock absorber, in which a piston compresses a volume that includes both a compressible gas and a substantially incompressible liquid. The volume includes two chambers separated by an orifice through which the liquid flows, such that the overall structure provides both resilient shock absorption and dampening of the oscillation of the oleo strut shock absorber. Typically, such landing gear structures include a main fitting (e.g., an outer tube), a piston (e.g., an inner tube), and a sliding tube cylinder, thus involving three tubes/cylinders. A landing gear structure that includes an oleo strut shock absorber may be compressed into a retracted configuration for stowage in the wheel well during flight. However, achieving the retracted configuration may require compressing the compressible gas to an undesirably high pressure. Additionally, such landing gear structures tend to be heavy and complex, thus creating potential disadvantages from aircraft economy, maintenance, and manufacture standpoints.